Isn't that an uber-wealthy city with the biggest concentration of billionaires? With so much wealth you 'd think they 'd have a say on what china wants to do with them. But maybe they just go along?
Hong Kong mourns the end of its way of life
101–110 of 288 posts
Re: Hong Kong mourns the end of its way of life
#102The circumstances of Britain's original forced takeover and colonization of Hong Kong in the Opium Wars are the greater evil to me. Righting that wrong after so long was always going to be painful. By analogy: a violent drug-dealer shoots you, robs you, and then kidnaps your child at gunpoint. Years later, you manage to have the child returned, but in the interim they have been taught by their captor to hate you and…
The people of Hong Kong aren't to blame for the original injustice, so why are they the ones being victimised?
That's true, the people of HK were raised to believe in British values on conquered land then abandoned there when Britain couldn't hold it any longer. Britain should have repatriated them all instead of putting them through this mess. Even POWs are treated better than their home country denying any involvement or responsibility when their overseas outpost gets captured.
Re: Hong Kong mourns the end of its way of life
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Free Tibet to go back to feudalism? You do know that Tibet and Taiwan wasn't any better for the poorer part of the people. Hong Kong is one of the most expensive places to live. The protesters are part of the privileged and are just fighting to keep them. Didn't hear them complaining back then in the asian banking crisis when China bailed them out with the money from exploited chinese workers.
> Didn't hear them complaining back then in the asian banking crisis when China bailed them out with the money from exploited chinese workers China “bailing out” Hong Kong is a common myth popularized by the CCP [0]. China refused to interfere with Hong Kong during the 1998 financial crisis, according to former Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa [1]. The Monetary Authority head did not acknowledge any help from China back…
Thanks for the sources.
Re: Hong Kong mourns the end of its way of life
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
So perhaps you were downvoted for being vague. But certainly things like the supreme court recently refusing to hear an important case on qualified immunity have me concerned that USA-ians are whistling past the graveyard right now.
They are also being down voted for trying to make this a conversation about the USA instead of about Hong Kong.
USA is relevant because any discussion of HK democracy or capitalism places it along an axis between the virtues championed, globally, by China and the US. Otherwise, what discussion is there to have about a Chinese city that the Chinese are dealing with as they see fit?
Re: Hong Kong mourns the end of its way of life
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
The best predictor for future behavior is past behavior: China is testing the waters, in some cases in a quite literal sense (South China Sea), and you're correct that how the world reacts to Hong Kong and the Xinjiang "re-education camps" will be seen as a vital piece of information in the future when deciding on how to proceed with other "problematic" regions: for example Taiwan, which in the case where strong-armi…
I want to say that defence treaties, are a bit special in the context of USA. Why USA has historically entered into so many treaties? They reason is is because USA's constitutional arrangement makes it really hard for the US government to declare a war... on the paper. So, by giving a treaty, USA was giving the strongest assurance that by turning a treaty into its own law, it prevents the chance of anybody in the con…
That’s an important point.
From a political standpoint, one of the purposes of the defense treaties has been to discourage allies from building up their own militaries. This was an explicit policy in the wake of WW2 to promote both US hegemony, but also to promote stability - the theory being a world with one dominant military power is less likely to see large wars like WW1 and WW2.
Re: Hong Kong mourns the end of its way of life
#106What has happened to Hong Kong is a strong canary-in-the-coal-mine indicator for other Chinese territorial disputes [i]. With Hong Kong it was somewhat inevitable but I can't help but imagine how different it would be if the US and EU/Britain (as leads) would have strongly denounced their approach. I suspect in a decade from now the West will be lamenting how Hong Kong was the right opportunity to stifle China's ambi…
We can no longer say "the west" and expect a unified response - brexit, the constant attacks on member nations of NATO by Trump, The Iran deal that Europe still backs but the US doesn't. There's a reason Russia and China are bold right now. EDIT: I get it, it's politically charged, but I remind everyone to discuss, rather than downvote, based on your own political opinion.
Sure, but that owes more to the fact that the ruling classes in “the west” now exist in solidarity with those in China, nationalist posturing aside.
Globalization unified Chinese elites with oligarchs in the US and Europe so they both could profit from exploitation of the Chinese labor force. But now that the country has developed past the point of this being easily profitable for all parties, the Chinese regime has to resort to ever more authoritarian tactics to keep the wheels spinning. Average people in western countries might oppose all of this, but the people who rule them put as much stock in these objections as the Chinese leaders do their dissenters.
Re: Hong Kong mourns the end of its way of life
#107Does anyone here have an informed opinion on what will happen to Taiwan?
Did an MBA in Hong Kong, just finished earlier this year. A lot of my classmates are mainland Chinese. Bunch of them would regularly talk with each other and say that military action was the only way to resolve the situation, China needs to send its military to Taiwan and overrun the Taiwanese defenses quickly. Baffles my mind that they're so ready to default to war. Some other mainland Chinese people are more nuance…
Taiwan is in 'China' in the same way as both North Korea and South Korea are in Korea.
The difference is that the People's Republic of China (what 'China' usually refers to) has decided that the Republic of China has ceased to exist in 1949 (Taiwan is the last remaining territory controlled by the Republic of China) and that they are strong enough to largely 'enforce' this policy on the world stage.
So, of course for Chinese this is a domestic issue.
The West cares because the PRC is an adversary and Taiwan has a strategic location on maritime routes to East Asia.
Re: Hong Kong mourns the end of its way of life
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
But the same generation was in power when we launched our twenty-year War on Terror, and the comparisons to Vietnam that started popping up a decade and a half ago didn't manifest in any sort of wariness to move forward and keep moving forward with our attempted "regime change." If anything, it's that which has changed our willingness to step forward militarily. The conclusion is that we spent our war capital on friv…
The war on terror was not about containing communism. It could not be labeled and dismissed as “anti-communist hysteria”
It was about extending capitalism (well, democracy morally and structurally enabling capitalistic integration of ME into the global market), and also an extension of Cold War jockeying, which was anti-communist (and arguably hysteria).
Re: Hong Kong mourns the end of its way of life
#109I suspect we will see China attempt to invade Taiwan sooner rather than later now. In particular I’ve suspected for awhile that China desperately wants to “own” Taiwan Semiconductor ($TSM) since they’ve been trying to build up their own domestic chip business for awhile and $TSM is the gold standard in chip manufacturing.
Any invasion of Taiwan will just leave TSMC a smoking husk, either from PLA jets or from self-destruct switches. Invading won't help in terms of owning TSMC's facilities and technology.
Re: Hong Kong mourns the end of its way of life
#110I've been boycotting Chinese goods whenever possible (it helps that I don't really buy electronics) because of Hong Kong. I regret not having started back when our professor urged us to do so roughly a decade ago. One time, we had officials from Chinese universities visit ours and he made sure to have big "free Tibet" patches on his jacket and backpack while always hanging around said officials. He was quite the char…
Free Tibet to go back to feudalism? You do know that Tibet and Taiwan wasn't any better for the poorer part of the people. Hong Kong is one of the most expensive places to live. The protesters are part of the privileged and are just fighting to keep them. Didn't hear them complaining back then in the asian banking crisis when China bailed them out with the money from exploited chinese workers.
> You do know that Tibet and Taiwan wasn't any better for the poorer part of the people
I'm not exactly sure what you're referring to, but Taiwan is generally considered a much nicer place to live than China for the average person.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_in_Asia_and_...